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Was Oracle Linux One Competitor Too Many?

Here is an interesting quote, from an interview by Jack Messman who was Novell Chief at the time (March 2006):
What about the market for operating systems? How will that change?

Because of the costs of software and hardware development you'll find two major open source operating systems left in a few years: Red Hat and Novell.

There'll still be hobbyist systems, but for business two is perfect. Any less and you'll have one company dominating to the detriment of the industry, any more and development costs go way up.

Our approach is different to Red Hat's. Red Hat is totally open source, whereas we offer a mixed stack. We do open enterprise software but also have proprietary code that's built to open standards. Our customers don't have heterogeneous software environments either, for that matter.


Perhaps for business two is perfect, and perhaps Novell was worried that those two would be Oracle and RedHat, not SuSE. Of course, GNU/Linux is about more than business, its about liberty and freedom, but MS and Novell won't ever get that.

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